Website Design Best Practices
Thoughtful website design will help you to attract visitors and will compel them to engage with your content in a manner that purposeful and satisfying. Here are a few best practices for website designers:
Consistent branding. Your brand identity is the foundation of your business, so it is important that all customer touchpoints have consistent branding. This includes logo, color scheme, iconography, voice, and messaging.
Intuitive navigation. Use clear language that is consistently used across other websites (such as “About” and “Contact”) that makes navigation quick and easy for your visitors. Tailor navigation to content and use descriptive mega menus. Use breadcrumbs to track and display where a user is on a website.
Dynamic content. Dynamic content encompasses video, text, and audio, and includes any relevant information for your potential customer, powered by SEO words.
Prioritized SEO. Search engine optimization aims to increase both the quality and quantity of website traffic. Know what people are searching for and in what words they are searching for them. Use target words through your website, responsive design, relevant header tag, proper title tags and meta descriptions, and short descriptive URLs.
Speed optimization. Website developers ensure that you do not lose visitors due to slow loading times through file compression, prefetching, removing unused CSS and JS, and video and image optimization. Consistently monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) like load time, page size, and image compression to be sure site performance metrics are continuing to perform well. Google also considers site speed when determining your search rank.
Mobile-first design. Mobile-first indexing means that Google primarily uses the mobile version of a webpage for ranking and indexing purposes. Design for mobile-first indexing includes design practices such as making sure that content is the same on desktop and mobile sites.
Clean design. A clean design will make your website easy and enjoyable by establishing a visual hierarchy and using white space effectively.
Text minimization. People tend to scan web page text rather than read the whole text. Be sure that the text you use is readable, targeted, has an appropriately sized font, and keeps lines between 50-60 characters.
Accessibility. Website accessibility for visitors with visual, motor, auditory, speech, or cognitive disabilities can include design elements such as contrasting colors, text labels or patterns, visual clues, and keyboard navigation support.
Clear CTAs. Calls-to-action motivate your visitors to act. A clear CTA button should be able to be spotted within three seconds.
Chatbots. Chatbots can provide visitors with immediate answers or provide them with paths to get answers.
Limit choices. Displaying too many options can lead to “analysis paralysis” where a visitor overanalyzing the choices that they are confronted with, leading to the paralysis of action. An example of limiting choices effectively could be displaying one version of a product initially, with more variations of that one product being displayed on a subsequent page.